Colleges are chasing money, but devaluing their degrees
New York University’s recent firing of a well-respected organic chemistry professor shows how colleges are increasingly resembling businesses that cater to the whims of their consumers. They’re increasingly competing not to deliver the best education possible, but to provide the best customer service. That means selling degrees with as little work as possible expected from their students.
Dr. Maitland Jones is an experienced and influential professor who has authored a textbook on organic chemistry and previously taught at Princeton University. NYU terminated him just prior to the 2022 fall semester after 82 out of his 350 students from last spring signed a petition complaining about him — though the document didn’t go as far as asking for him to be fired. The students’ complaint? Dr. Jones’ class was too hard. His standards were too high, which meant their grades were too low.
Now, organic chemistry is hard — notoriously hard. As a second year student currently enrolled in organic chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, I can attest to the challenge. Just this past week my first test was graded, and the class average was 60%. That’s typical, at Pitt and elsewhere.
Organic chemistry is known at most schools as a “weed-out” class, especially for pre-health students. According to the New York Times article on Dr. Jones’ firing, he and his colleagues noticed that more students were enrolling in their classes since they were interested in pursuing medicine, yet at the same time there was a loss of focus among students. It’s no secret that campus mental health has suffered during the COVID pandemic.
But that’s no excuse for declining standards, especially for material that’s essential to producing competent health care professionals. And it’s certainly no reason to fire a professor for keeping standards high.
My peers and I have had our fair share of difficult professors, and as much as we enjoy scapegoating them for our poor performance, at the end of the day we are responsible for our own success, or failure. One of the first pieces of advice any college freshman receives is that in college, parents and teachers can’t personally monitor your progress any longer. You have to figure it out for yourself.
And that means that students who learn this lesson and put in the work will generally achieve better grades than those who don’t. There’s nothing unfair about that.
At their core, after all, universities are supposed to be hubs of education and innovation. Students pay tuition in order to study under the best teachers and experts, and in turn they are expected to perform at the standards set by those educators. While there is a transactional element to the relationship, colleges are not retail businesses. The customer is not always right.
The entire point is that the customer has a lot to learn.
Dr. Jones’ firing, however, shows how this is changing, and for the worse. College is increasingly treated more as a commodity, and less as the passing-down of knowledge from the knowledgeable to the less knowledgeable. More students enrolling in universities, backed by guaranteed federal loans, means more universities are competing for students — and, more importantly, their tuition dollars.
Traditionally, given the hundreds of thousands of dollars students pay to top tier universities like NYU, one would expect students to demand a top tier education from talented professors. But now the opposite is happening. Many students treat college as means to an end, and that end isn’t education, but merely the degree at the very end.
In an email to Dr. Jones prior to his firing, the NYU chemistry department’s director of undergraduate studies said the department’s plan would be to “extend a gentle but firm hand to the students and those who pay the tuition bills,” which clearly indicated prioritizing profits over performance.
But this trend — and this story in particular — undermines the hard work of students who prepared themselves for class, worked through the difficulties and mastered the material. Remember that only about one in four of Dr. Jones’ students signed the complaint. Many other students thrived. Take student Ryan Xue, who found Dr. Jones to be “likable and inspiring.” For students like him, Dr. Jones’ termination, and the subsequent review of the grades he distributed, invalidates their hard work since their peers can simply complain to receive a better outcome.
The facts of organic chemistry haven’t changed, but the institutions where it’s taught, and the students who need to learn it, certainly have. Especially with the challenges of the pandemic, many students have entered college less prepared for its challenges. That may mean adjusting pedagogical methods or offering more academic support for students, but it can’t mean acting like proficiency in the subject matter no longer matters. And it can’t mean sacking professors who won’t get in line with the new profit-first, education-second model.
It should be mentioned that Dr. Jones was semi-retired, and served as an adjunct during his time at
NYU. That means that he lacked the protections given to tenure and tenure-track professors. Colleges are increasing relying on these teachers, since they’re cheaper to pay and easier to kick to the curb, a perfect puppet for a profit-centered business model. NYU’s firing of Dr. Jones is a shot across the bow of all of its adjunct professors, telling them that their job is first to serve the university’s financial interests, and only second to educate their students.
And that ultimately means that they serve at the pleasure of their students. If a professor is at risk of termination due to students unhappy with their grades, his two options are to inflate grades or lower standards. Either way, this leads to unqualified students receiving credentials they haven’t earned, eventually devaluing those credentials. In the case of prehealth students studying to be health care professionals, that’s downright dangerous.
The story of Dr. Jones should be a wakeup call for us all. Students like me need to redouble our efforts to work hard and master the material presented to us, because even the people in charge of our universities don’t seem to care much anymore. Professors and educators need to see the writing on the wall and be ready to defend actually teaching their students, rather than doling out high grades willy-nilly.
And university administrators need to do some soul-searching and decide what kind of institutions they really want to be. Because the path we’re on now leads to the further devaluing of college degrees, and of the very idea of the university.
Many students treat college as means to an end, and that end isn’t education, but merely the degree at the very end.